Online shopping has increased in recent years. Consumers use technology to simplify the shopping experience to shop from home without needing to travel to the store. Merchants have become increasingly competitive to market their products and services to consumers over the Internet. Traditionally, when a consumer sees an advertisement for a product or desires to purchase something online, the consumer needs to visit the website for the merchant in order to complete the transaction. This may be undesirable in certain situations. For example, consumers may not wish to be distracted by advertisements or may not wish to leave the website that they are viewing in order to purchase something. As a result, online sales potential is diminished due to lack of convenience from the consumer perspective. Additionally, hosts of the website the consumer is viewing may not want consumers to leave their website to go transact business elsewhere.
Videos and other types of media are often popular among viewers. Websites, such as YouTube, allow users to post videos for others to view. Some videos gain popularity that can be tracked through number of views or “hits.”
Monetization of media content can present challenges even despite the popularity of the video. For example, some websites provide advertising that is displayed prior to the video or elsewhere on the webpage. Such advertisements may interfere with the video content and may annoy viewers. While website advertisement may generate some revenue, that revenue is often primarily retained by the website hosting the video content. This results in a dynamic where the website doing the hosting profits financially while the creators of the video content, although gaining notoriety, often struggle to see a return on investment.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods, systems, devices and computer readable media that take into account one or more of these issues and possibly other issues as well. For example, there is a need to bring the store to the consumer.